Comics and culture commentary from some other guy named Marc Singer.

July 10, 2006

Beating a Dead Man's Chest

As one of the Curmudgeons used to say, this is not a review. There's no point to reviewing Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, a movie that has proven quite review-proof. Hell, you've probably already seen it anyway, quite possibly in a theater filled with people your own age or older dressed in halfassed or occasionally fullassed pirate "garb."

If this were a review I might ask how a movie can run more than two hours and post several prolonged climaxes and still not have an ending. I might bemoan that every successful franchise tries to force itself into the Star Wars trilogy model, complete with the requisite dead, captive, or comatose protagonist at the end of the second installment, observing that this one skips the carbonite and sends its hero straight into a floating Sarlacc Pit. I might wonder why, given the runaway popularity of Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow, the producers still gave more screen time to boring Orlando Bloom.

But it's already too late, was always already too late, for reviews, even spot-on ones, so this is not a review. It's a response to one dull, disturbing, and completely unnecessary element that all but ruined the movie.

The trouble starts with an overlong sequence in which Jack Sparrow, Will Turner, and the rest of the crew of the Black Pearl find themselves captives on an island. The eventual escape is choreographed amusingly enough but the entire episode is a narrative dead end, an obstacle to getting the movie doing what it should have been doing all along--imitating the first one with some more swashbuckling on the high seas.

Instead we get what feels like a solid hour or so of vintage racial caricatures as the pirates are held captive by savage natives. Of course they're cannibals, even if we now know that stories of Caribbean cannibalism were rumors used to justify European colonialism and slavery. (The term "cannibal" comes from a name Columbus used for the Carib nations; apparently it originally meant "brave and daring" to the Spanish and had nothing to do with eating human flesh.) Of course Jack Sparrow is their white god.

But none of this is supposed to be real, right? I'm pretty sure real pirates didn't have swordfights in runaway mill wheels or get chased by giant krakens either. Everything in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Placeholder Before the Third and Hopefully Final Movie is drawn from a surprisingly shallow repository of cliches, but there's a difference with the cannibal stuff. Two differences, actually: it uncritically recycles racist propaganda and it's part of a larger pattern of insulting portrayals of nonwhite characters. When a fatal fall in the same sequence kills half the crew of the Black Pearl--the reckless, treacherous half, so they deserve it--it claims all of the nonwhite pirates. Treacherous white characters like Jack Sparrow or Elizabeth Swann or Gareth from The Office and the guy who got his thumbs broken on Seinfeld will live to see the third installment, but the dark-skinned ones aren't so lucky. And while the surviving white pirates all have some kind of identifying gimmick or maybe even a name, the darker shipmates are just anonymous scum.

Treachery, cannibalism, and cannon fodder aren't the only roles for nonwhite characters. They have one more part to play, the same one as always: providing spiritual guidance for the white leads. Jack and company escape the anthropophagists but not the stereotypes; their next port of call is some sort of maroon settlement with a hammy voodoo priestess who sets them on the right path (although, in the manner of this movie, she tells them almost nothing they don't already know or need to know--the better to stretch this wafer-thin plot over two and a half hours, and to make sure no audience member is too stupid to follow along). Oh, and she flirts with every attractive male in sight, just another hypersexualized black character. The rotting teeth, I concede, are a novelty.

All these screaming cannibals and voodoo hags are queasily reminiscent of the Skull Islanders in Peter Jackson's King Kong, but Pirates lacks even the arch movie quotations and pretentious Conrad passages that served as Jackson's halfhearted acknowledgement that there is something objectionable about his loving recreation of the racist fantasies of the 1930s. At least Jackson knows his source material is troubling and tries to anticipate that response; Pirates enthusiastically embraces every stereotype it can find without considering where they come from or what baggage they might carry.

Responding to these stereotypes is difficult. It's not enough to fold our arms and frown and say these caricatures are racist (although they certainly are), as if that label alone could change people's minds, because clearly it doesn't. Instead it triggers a tiresome confrontation where the script runs something like this: piece of pop culture makes disturbing or outrageous use of racial stereotypes. Critic (preferably one of those elitist journalists or academics) calls it racist, confident that this settles the matter. Indignant fans flood comment box, accusations of political correctness mingling with declarations that you're not supposed to take pop culture seriously anyway, frequently delivered with a spittle-flinging rancor that makes the critic's point better than they ever could. Go here for a typical example. What's your favorite reply--the guy who praises Lord of the Rings for showing "that a whites-only movie, geared toward a white audience, can succeed at the box office" (at last, a movie white people can watch!) or the guy who seems to think Moby Dick doesn't have any subtext? Meanwhile the next blockbuster to feature cannibal darkies is already in postproduction.

Maybe we shouldn't settle for merely identifying racist stereotypes as if we expect everybody to agree that they persist in our popular culture and that they're a problem--two assumptions we can't afford. Maybe we need to explain why they're a problem: in the case of Pirates because they reduce all nonwhites to mindless savages, backstabbing idiots, or cheerleaders for white people.

Most importantly, maybe we should ask why, in the twenty-first century, we're still taking such great pleasure from the racist propaganda of the twentieth century, or the nineteenth... or, now that Dead Man's Chest has bested all competitors, the fifteenth. Maybe we need to mock these caricatures relentlessly wherever we find them.

At the risk of starting an incredibly formulatic discussion: this is huge issue for genre films to navigate, especially those that have roots in the pulps, since some of these wonky racial assumptions are woven into their DNA. It's not accident that the best recent Westerns feature only cowboys.

"The magical negro"--that's the perfect term, and one I should have used. Any readers who think characters like Tia Dalma are "positive" (because they're not trying to eat the white people, I guess) should check out this Wikipedia entry for more information.

Although in the way of most Wikipedia entries on cultural controversies, I don't think it represents the criticism all that well. The authors say that critics like Spike Lee or Aaron Magruder "believe that the use of this stock character is racist, because it perpetuates the idea that blacks should be subordinate to whites." Well, ultimately, yes, but it's not like the Tia Dalmas are directly promoting that idea a la Stepin Fetchit. I could see someone reading that description, deciding they haven't seen it in characters like Tia Dalma or Bagger Vance, and concluding that the critics are full of shit (and their favorite movies are off the hook).

The magical negro is a little more insidious than that. While they are allied with the white hero, the problem is that the hero is always white, and the magical negro is most definitely not an equal partner. They're the guru, sidekick, advisor, or cheerleader--their job is to get the white heroes, the really important characters, morally or spiritually in shape. And so while the movies pretend to flatter blacks by claiming they're more spiritual (just a modern version of the old "noble savage" stereotype) they're always pressing them into servicing white folks' souls. And that's how the magical negro perpetuates one very particular kind of subordination.

Reconstructing a comment that got lost to Typepad maintenance--Dave, part of what's so galling about Dead Man's Chest is that the stereotypes were completely unnecessary to both the story and the pirate genre.

I can understand why Peter Jackson had to include some version of the Skull Islanders--it would be difficult to remake King Kong without them--and that's why I'm inclined to cut him a little more slack. (Although this begs the question of whether the world really needed a modern remake of a racist 1930s parable in the first place; and it ignores the disconnect between the New York scenes, which ache for a kind of social realism, and the out and out racial caricature of Skull Island.)

But did Dead Man's Chest really need the cannibals, or the magical negro priestess? Did it need to make the treacherous crew dark-skinned and the loyal one white? Why not ignore the wonky racial assumptions entirely?

Fiction has ancestors, but no DNA--nothing that can't be changed if the creators are willing. And the creators of Dead Man's Chest so clearly weren't.

On Tia Dalma existing only to service the white hero's plot: I'm not sure yet. Remember this was the first part of a two-part story. Also remember that this is a film that goes out of its way to slap us in the face with the idea that everyone has a non-altruistic agenda. Given that, Dalma's lack of apparent motivation looks less like racist bad writing and more like deliberate mystery that's going to get a big revelation.

I actually saw that comment in the brief period it was up. Thought maybe you pulled it for some reason.

Anyway. I haven't seen DMC yet, so I can't respond to the particular points raised, though I have no reason to doubt your take on the film. In any event, my point wasn't to justify film racism, either in DMC or elsewhere, but to point out that, as genre films get more popular, it's going to be interesting to see how the racism inherent in some genres gets dealt with. Fiction may not have DNA, but it's ancestors aren't dead; they're still taking their turn on the stage for the paying crowd, warts and all.

Plese do excuse the mutated and butchered a metaphor.

At the risk of overstating my case: the lost civilation/explorer genre (inclusive of, say, King Kong, Raiders, the Mummy, etc) is built on a whole series of colonialist assumptions, and can't function without them; the exotic as scary and in need of violent taming, but for the lusty native women, in need of taming of a different sort. As you said, without Skull Island, you've got no Kong. Of course, the degree each film needs to zealously embrace its pedigree is debatable; but it can't, I think, reject it entirely.

Or, like I said above, Westerns. I'm not certain that anyone has the ability to make a "cowboys and indians" movie anymore; either the Native Americans wind up as savages or else (in the variation of the magical negro) as the wise people of the earth, which, as you and Kitty note, denies the humanity of people in a less obvious, but just as pernicous, way. You can still make westerns, and it assuredly possible to make a western with Native Americans, but it would take an amount of skill and criticality I'm not certain many folks possess.

To be clear: I'm not arguing we should accept these portrayals, in these or any other films. And maybe there are ways, for each particular film, to avoid or minimize them. But those ways are not necassarily obvious, and the plot contortions necessary in some (perhaps limited) circumstances will be interesting to watch.

Interesting in the critical sense of the term of course; a high caveat to statement ration in this comment.

You already said it. "Mother of Champions"? Good lord... The worst part is, they're so clearly Morrison's handiwork. I doubt Waid, Johns, or Rucka could have thought up a woman who births litters of superhumans, and for once their lack of imagination is enviable.

I don't think it's necessarily a problem that the Great Ten are defined by their Chinese-ness: every foreign superhero in American comics is defined by their non-Americanness, from Canada outwards. And the attempts to do non-foreign foreigners, the Chinese Starmen if you will, usually fall flat without the foreign hook--maybe this is why Vindicator/Guardian was so disposable. (The costume design was his one saving grace.) Busiek had some interesting thoughts on this in the Astro City letter column--they basically boiled down to embracing the fact that the most significant things about these foreign characters will be their foreignness.

None of which means you should design the characters around the worst stereotypes about their culture. Jesus.

Phil: I don't buy the wait-and-see excuse when it's applied to comics, either--we evaluate these things in the form they come to us, and in this movie Tia Dalma is a typical example of the magical negro. More importantly, I'm not sure that adding a few more convolutions to the plot actually changes Tia Dalma's overall dramatic role--she still exists to give the white heroes spiritual guidance and point them in the right direction to carry out their plot.

Excellent post. It's interesting how much of this stuff flowed over me when I watched the movie. I was too busy staring at orlando Bloom and going "Oh, he's soooo pretty." But, you're right, completely boring. I'm sure plenty of other people didn't even twich during the cannibal section or notice that only the dark crewmen fell to their deaths. The shiny was so very.... shiny.

Jason, wasn't Davey Jones' lover supposed to be a goddess of the sea? It strikes me as odd that a goddess of the sea would be living inland. That would hardly be the largest inconsistency in these movies, though.

In any case, I think explanations like yours or Phil's are somewhat orthogonal to my point: yes, plotwise Tia Dalma might turn out to have some sinister agenda (there's also a popular theory that she set up Sparrow's death in order to resurrect Barbossa), but structurally she's still the magical negro whether she has a sinister agenda or not. In fact, having a sinister agenda might make her the magical negro and just another one of the movie's treacherous black faces. Either way her role is still providing spiritual guidance for the whites, in accordance with the cliche.

In another thread Erik Germani writes, "you pretty much systematically take each black character and name it as some sort of stereotype - my question is: what are examples of positive black characters? For instance, I thought the black ship's officer was a positive character - he was heroic and level-headed. But this apparently is a slave character."

First of all, I might change your terminology a little bit--looking for "positive" black characters leads to "positive" but equally essentializing stereotypes like the magical negro. I wouldn't be surprised if Tia Dalma were created to be just such a character, so viewers who felt queasy about the cannibals could comfort themselves that the film included a "positive" minority. As if one balanced the other.

I don't think minority characters need to be positive--just as fleshed-out, complicated, and above all non-stereotypical as white male ones. I don't think any of the minority characters in Dead Man's Chest fit that bill.

I assume the black ship's officer you're referring to is the guy in King Kong. He, too, strikes me as another attempt to provide "balance" and defuse charges of racism, although the end result is a fairly bloodless character. He exists to assuage our guilt and cover Peter Jackson's ass but he doesn't bring much else to the table. Unfortunately Jackson soon slots him into another venerable role for minority characters: cannon fodder.

I can at least appreciate that Jackson is trying to edge around the racism of his source, but his solution is to invoke another, more recent set of cinema stereotypes. Maybe our movies wouldn't have these problems if they focused on telling stories for the present instead of animating the cliches of the past.

With regards to racism in Peter Jackson's King Kong, why does no one ever mention how much more progressive the 1976 movie is in this regard? That film's token black sailor named Boan actually survives the log-tipping scene where all of the white crew members die, whereas Jackson's token black sailor named Hayes bites the big one in his film's version of that very scene.

In fact, whenever people bring up the idea of Hollywood racism and complain about the black guy(s) always dying, I always wonder why King Kong 1976 never gets a mention as one of the movies that (for all its faults) went against the norm and not only didn't kill off its sole black sailor first, but also spared him outright.

I haven't seen the de Laurentis remake, but I have to say this is virtually the first positive comment I've ever heard about it (in regards to race or anything else). According to most of the accounts I've read de Laurentis' Skull Islanders were just as bad as the originals, and this comment doesn't inspire confidence in the producers. Glad to hear it avoided at least one cliche.

This particular example aside, it strikes me as plausible that 1976 was in some ways more racially progressive than 2006. Deeply depressing, but plausible.

I also felt uncomfortable during the entire cannibal sequence for all reasons mentioned above and the proximity to last year's King Kong.

The racism of DMC went over the top with me during the scene where the "chinese" pirate (of Davy Jones' crew) lost his head and began talking in Cantonese for comic relief. We have a long way to go, folks.

I figured the blackened teeth/lips were a variant on West African henna fashions. Though I could have done without the bloodshot eyes, myself.

I was trying very, very hard to ignore the implicit racism in the cannibalism scene. But the cage full of non-white guys? Was just too hard to ignore. Look! We used affirmative action to hire our pirate extras! We have a diverse, multi-racial crew of brigands -- whoops. Nevermind, now we don't!